Plans for 2014-2015

In the past 6 months, I”ve only had time for a handful of tiny commits to the Blender code. As much as I love coding and work on Blender itself, I”m also quite useful for other tasks – especially to help the Blender project to grow, become more professional and to get more developers on board.

Blender has grown as a community and volunteering project very well in the past decade, but the current user demands and our ambitions also require that we need more full-time developers on board. The past Open Movies have helped with that, and last year the Development Fund and gifts from sponsors allowed us to hire more people as well.

To consolidate this development and Blender”s future, I”ve been mostly working on preparing for a huge project – making a feature film with a dozen of Blender studios and setting up a lot of big development projects to support this goal. That”s nicked “Project Gooseberry”.

A first big milestone achievement is the approval by the EU Media Fund to support us in their program for “Open Production Environments”. This is a two year project, approved for funding in 2014 and – if we do well – for another year in 2015. This subsidy – about 220k euro per year – is going to be spent mostly on supporting Blender development and general open source work on enabling small teams to collaborate online on 3D animation projects.

Full statistics on usability and daily workflow for the entire project. (High demand by scientists).

And: lots of general development on improving our open source creation tools.

And that”s not all – it”s just the beginning! A lot of preparations were done on getting Gooseberry setup with many people already. An announcement of the teams (artists and developers) and much more is scheduled to happen early January 2014.

Special attention will also go to ensuring that all current and new online projects for Blender can continue happily – for everyone. This project is not meant to be disruptive for releases or stability, but just a big leap forward 🙂

A feature movie in blender sounds like a really interesting but challenging project. Will it include live action footage like ToS or fully animated?
And by the way, the gooseberry website for mobile is buggy, some of the text isn’t displayed…
Anyway, I’m really looking forward to reading about the production process!

It’s going to be a full Blender animated and rendered movie.
The website scales badly yes… it’s a placeholder site we added for sponsors we are contacting right now. More work on it will happen in the coming weeks.

The asset/project management stuff is something we really want at 3Dami (3dami.org) – when our students finish they inevitably have an unpolished short – we always suggest they continue to work at it, get it polished and submit to film festivals, but nothing ever comes of it. We simply can’t support them in such an endeavour as we don’t have any kind of distributed project management capability. The other thing is during the events we run we use spreadsheets for asset management – they inevitably get totally out of synch with the actual project files, which causes problems. This could prove to be really valuable to us basically – I am hoping we can get involved at some level, to get the features we need in:-)

Quick question… Will you “accept” collaboration from individuals as well as studios?… Let’s say I offer to work on a shot or scene (modeling, animating, lighting, materials, post-pro, whatever is my strength). Maybe I’m getting ahead, but you could take a small portion of the script and decide which parts can be created relatively isolated from the rest, so interested (and talented) individuals can work on them.

Wow, Ton, this is really exciting. Blender and it’s development has been so exciting since I started using it in 2006! That’s eight years of fun playing, learning, helping others, use Blender. It don’t get any better. Thanks for all your past and future vision of what Blender should be Ton!

And the Blender Engine need re-write, or make standalone (at base Blender), or take anything engine (ID tech,Panda,TORQUE,etc.).
As well need make Converter GLSL shader ->to-> Cycles shader (similar HLSL2GLSL) and Cycles-to-GLSL.
And…good luck ! Any a film projects it’s very good a move force.

Ton, it’s great news, thanks for sharing with us. Open movie projects in practical environment really helped Blender to gain momentum. And this one is pretty huge – with dozen studios (and individuals probably) to take part in it. Can’t wait to see, how this project will be unfolding.

I just want to know, why the Blender game engine don’t deserve the same attention?, I spend a lot of time learning it, now is sad to see that only the film and production pipeline have support and improvements.

I think the “Exploitation Window” is an excellent idea and a much more sustainable way to keep open movie projects going. If you can get a distributor on board and let it have a theater run before you release the source, the money coming in would be from a much broader base, outside the open source community.
Plus: if you can show the project is making money, more studio’s will be tempted to make sequels and spin-offs using the source files, thus further promoting Blender.
Promoting open source and open content, while allowing developers and artists to make a living is truly the bests of both worlds

I wonder if a new open source/content licence using this exploitation window might be usefull to further promote open content. Something like: “You can modify these source files and use it to make your own artwork, profided you release the modified source under this licence within 1 (or 2) years after release of the new work to the public”
You might still retain copyright on the finished work, ensuring the modified work is significantly different and original, promoting creativity, but you would have to let go of the Micky Mouse type character copyright.

Do you plan to release it to theaters? I know that makes it “not free”, but a serious feature-length movie HAS to be commercially distributed. Plus, you can always distribute an online version free. I will still go to the theater if you do that.

That is the “exploitation window” Martin mentions above. It’s written on our gooseberry.blender.org site.
Most films only have a very short period of exploitation anyway – especially for theatrical release. DVD bizz is declining… can be ignored I think. Online distribution (Netflix, HBO, Youtube) we look into as well.

We will just decide to limit this to a fixed period, the “window”. After that we just free it all.

How about showing your progress in the website each time the project has reached a milestone? This way, you can show your stakeholders how much you guys have progressed while showing outsiders how stunning Blender has become. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. You can show them as a reel, a workflow introduction, or as a documentary video, while gaining more users in the go 🙂

And by the way, do you have any standard quality you want to achieve in this project?

Even better, we are working on a funding method to replace the DVD pre-sale with cloud access to a massive shared area of the film project – including the data from previous projects we did! Details follow in January!

Asset Management function is what I needed!
I usually nest Background Scene from other Blend file to animate character scene
then nest animated character scene as Background Scene on Rendering Scene to render and so on..

A good way of doing the crowd-funding could be having in the site different branches to which the user could chose to fund 15% of his donation and have some sort of amount of money goal (eg. 1500euros away from starting implementation of Android export). This way the user would have some sort of say and would know exactly what he is funding and would much more happily donate. I wouldn’t discard the general Blender Foundation donation, but 15% of the donation could go to a branch of the users choosing, if he wished so. I think it would bring in many more donations.

If a game developer wants to donate to Game Engine development in Blender, but sees that his donations are going to the Animation system he might not want to donate anymore. Also, this way, the Foundation would know what are the main specific interests of the users.

A lot of people will loudly voice their opinion when it’s free, but are they willing to put their money into it? I would certainly donate more if I knew that my donation was going toward developing my favorite part of blender: The Game Engine. I’m not against Ton’s plan to restructure the engine, but I’d like to see it happen sooner than later.

I’m not against the idea of using personal site for crowd-funding, but using more popular platform like Kickstarter is definitely gonna attract more passionate veterans to get involved with this project.

An open movie, using open source development tools, with open assets for everyone! I can not see how anyone wouldn’t be interested with this idea 🙂

Great news! Des who started to use the blender a few years, I always wanted to see a long completely done it and maybe join a, I’m cheering this project as well as all others will be absolute success will help finance.

Exciting news. I can’t wait to hear more about it. I hope that I can contribute with something somewhere in the process. I certainly will be following the project very closely.
Pre-sale with VIP-access to some kind of collaborative website/cloud-service sounds to me like an awesome idea. I hope that becomes reality.

(-a crazy, spontanious idea: Maybe a Gooseberry addon for Blender? Where people could collaborate on creating assets for the movie?)

The exploitation window is a great idea, I hope it will enough money back to studios.

Just a remark : Please have a good storyline. People don’t care if the CG is not exactly like Pixar, but if the storyline is bad this makes the movie bad (at least for non-CG people). It’d be really a shame to invest so much people & money just to make a technical showcase.

Do you plan on asking the community to participate for small tasks ? For e.g if the film needs some random objects (a chair, a tree, a background building, etc… ) will you try to ask people to help. Of course it will not work for important objects like characters but for random objects you don’t have to be part of the team to participate.

People who support this project – and the people who organize it – do care about good looking CG, after all that’s what Blender is meant to deliver! So that’s at least the minimum we aim to do.

Obviously we want the best story and script possible too. But you should realize that Pixar spends probably as much resources to story development and good storytelling as to good CG. If storytelling was that simple, you’d see a lot more good movies out there. 🙂

Nearly every film that gets made, is being done by people who did an honest attempt to do the best they could on that. It’s really a too easy observation to claim they just have write better scripts… if only that were true! Instead, it’s about the entire process where each and every aspect counts, and where you only know if that really works in the end.

I like the idea of involving studios instead of a lot of individual people. Sounds a lot easier to manage, and everybody would work better as a team, since they’ve worked with each other before. For a movie, you absolutely want people who can work as a team.

As for individuals creating supplemental assets, that’s what BlendSwap is for. If you want a background object, you don’t want to assign it to somebody who might take a long time and you don’t want to get a flood of random submissions of the same thing of varying quality. Background objects should either be already created or made by somebody who is properly vetted for quality and efficiency, and knows the style to match. Hopefully if Gooseberry uses BlendSwap assets, you can find the right objects with the right license. I know you’ll have strict requirements for the license.

I believe that to get more funding for the production of this movie, maybe it has been tried I don’t know, you should go for a broader funding model. Not focus only about developing the software. But also that you are making a film.

It is going to be the world first open source feature animation. Milk that for all it is worth. Go to those that do open source software for a living and does have money filled pockets. Red Hat, Canonical and what not.

Or get the funding from another source. Like when Monthy Python got the money to make ‘Monthy Python and the Holy Grail. They got it from the most influentual rock bands at that time. Not from the movie industry but the music industry. I believe that there is still bands out there with too much money that would like to make history.

Of course this is just the film project, which allows to tackle more complex topics. All the other Blender development work should and will continue as usual, and most likely better supported than ever.

The UI discussion gave a bit false impression as if we didn’t work on it. Check the top 20 committers of last year, 5 work specifically on UI, and at least half of them on tools and usability in general.

What does a feature length film do that a short film with higher quality and technical goals not do? The reason I ask this is why go feature length specifically? Seems smarter to one or more collaborative short films with far higher technical goals and quality than a long film stretched out over time, which could cause problems with changes made along the way. Shorter films give a bit more room to respond to change. See the usual blizzard cinematics or what comes out of Blur studios to see shorts with higher technical achievements and quality.

The other question is this, if and when you do start the development of this project, will you be able to release something along the lines of a developer diary? For example, during the filming of the Hobbit, Peter jackson would release production vids showing the behind the scenes and the process that went in to make it. On the video game side, the crowd funded game, Star Citizen (just topped $35 million in crowdfunding, still rising), they release vids weekly known as the “wing mans hanger” where they talk a bit about production and whats been going on so far.

What feature length adds:
– Interesting technical complexity issues
– A good way to involve many studios, so each has a decent chunk of work
– We want to support small studios to grow and get experience
– Get a product in end with a possible market to return investment
– Short film crowd-funders care common now, and don’t attract much support and attention anymore.
– Personally: I like new challenges 🙂 And for sure all the makers appreciate work on features better than on a short.

Second question: for sure we’ll open up loads of our progress. We work on something that’s far better than what we did before.

Hey Ton,
This all looks awesome. I am really excited about it. To echo a point made above, along with plot, acting talent (in this case voice acting) is really really important. I love everything Blender, but I think often times we get caught up in the technicals of a project and making it look beautiful, that we overlook the need for people to bring a convincing performance to the screen. It is another one of those things that instantly ‘kills it’.
Obviously, it’s going to look great, no question about it. But finding just the right casting will really take it up to that ‘industry standard’ feel. Now, people who are good at doing this are probably not inherently interested in 3D, so it may be difficult to locate talent. Try looking in schools, or open casting calls for people that have real, if not recognized talent.
Thanks. You are a hero to many.

Nice! What about the genre? Is it going to be Sci-Fi or do I remember that wrong because of the Tears Of Steel / Project Gooseberry announcement overlap?

What I would love to see is more than “just” a movie. Imagine the community had a Wiki or a similar platform to flesh out the universe of the movie.
I have been playing the thought for a while now and I think something like an Open Source Franchise (shared intellectual property) would be a great thing for many creative people.

Maybe an idea for the Crowdfunding stage: take a look at what “Elite: Dangerous” has done … they created Anthologies with stories staged in the ‘verse (written by fans who cared). Might be a nice additional “Perk” … or offer nice input for bonus material.

Hi,
first I’m really happy Project Gooseberry exists and is fonded!
Hope all concerns will be unnecessary, as everything will run perfectly smooth! 🙂
Still, here my concerns and hopefully totally unnecessary!

“…One director – One story, told by many teams in their own styles…”

– Please provide a “style sheet”. Please! I do not want in the end a movie like “Werner – Beinhart!” The movie changes its style (of course there very drastic from real-life to comic) and made the movie really bad. Even the people loved one of the two styles. But as a german phrase: “Viele Köche verderben den Brei”.

So please try to give as much as possible inside for the style. I loved the sketches from David Revoy. Please create a workbook of sketches, a small novel from the story or its introduction, a logo for the movie, a reference of existing movies which are mentors, a color style for each feeling, a description of the world for its social environment!
Please!

Hiee ton…
happy to heard about that gooseberry announced, would love to be a part of it,

i read the coding list which are really large targets and its take a blender to the another level, the simulations part would be the better working efficiency for blender, spe. Hair simulations. With the gooseberry completion, it will be the another milestone project for blender,
and i read this discussion in the thread,as per me UI changes are not necessory part right now, AS u mention that you are not concentrating on UI changes part, i am agree with you. Blender has perfect UI since 2.5,
.so everything is good going process, Best luck for the gooseberry..

Great news!
Is there any way to get involved as a studios, I work on a studio based in the south of Sweden and we use Blender as our main 3D software, and I my self have been using Blender for the past 12 years.

Story wise, I hope this one is about climate change. We are at, or actually possibly over, a tipping point, and if there’s any subject we can and SHOULD reach a lot of people with, it’s this.

What about a story where you follow theough the eyes of a couple of different people and generations. There would be 2 main distinctions:
1. People from different areas on earth, and how their issues connect them (palm oil deforestation vs palm oil products for instance… like people in the area of Sumatera fighting a losing battle to preserve their forest for livelihood, with orang utans in it, who lose their habitat due to either big company pressure and corruption and/or small village people who want a better life and are not educated about the fact that they are destroying their OWN homes for generations to come)

2. Different time zones. Then vs now vs future/alt future.

This would also allow studios around the world to work on a part from a region or culture they are familiar with.

We could do this in different ways… we could tell a story like this through the eyes of some animal species we are affecting. Animals always work well in animation… but it might disconnect with people then instead…
Or we tell it through the eyes of people from different ages/walks of life and different places and socio economic cultures.

A few key points/ideas:
– Deforestation in Sumatera (in particular the Leuser and Aceh region)
– Bomb and cyanide fishing which destroys coral reef…
– Deforestation, turning swamps and mangroves (aka, marine nurseries) into developed, dry land.
– Coal plants in Australia
– Mining in Australia
– cutting of primordial forest in Australia
– consumption of coal and basically EVERYTHING else, in China.
– the pollution in China for most people… the rumors that it’s leadership eats food from different fields than its general population.
– the fukushima reactor in Japan. And Japans plan to reopen another, bigger reactor on the west coast.
– Japanese stubborn whaling with it’s whaling vessels.
– shark finning (which is fortunately starting to get into decline… but may be too late, too little)
– The typhoon in the Phillipines.
– the territorial dispute/bullying over territory in the south China sea which holds a HUGE healthy ecosystem which WILL be destroyed by governments and companies because there is also a vast untapped oil/gas field there.
– likewise for Borneo: oil/gas and deforestation and destruction of human SUSTAINABLE tribes and human trafficking for palm tree plantations.

– How consumerism from big corporations to little people makes a difference.

Time lines:
1. A past were things were sustainable
2. The tipping point where we are/were right now
3. The grim future for us if nothing changes
4. An alternative sustainable world where we got rid of the current economic/cultural system and started to use a lot of alternative, sustainable solutions.

I was somewhat surprised to see that Andrew Price is not included in the list of people supported by the funds. He’s done incredibly good job regarding his young age with regards to getting people to understand what Blender is and how you can get things done with it.

Overall I think this is great news!! However, it concerns me that a feature length animation is expected to be completed within two years. Have you consulting with individuals in the industry on this? A solid, animated full-length movie I would think is minimum 4 years development – twice what you have allocated. Realizing your time constraints due to funding, don’t sacrifice quality here. A good movie will make a lot more money and further Blender’s cause than a poor one.

Another concern is so many individual studios working on this. Coordination is going to be very tricky especially because you will be developing the collaborative tools during the development process. I know you all have experience with this type of scenario though. I just don’t want you to loose a lot of time figuring out how to streamline the process/communication effectively.

I like the idea of “fantasy, animals, nature & cartoonish fun drama.” Big Buck Bunny was well received and I think would be a wider audience than a Sintel like story-line (also a great short though!). I wish the best of luck to you and will support the cause! I have the highest confidence that you will pull this off in spectacular fashion.

Hey please tell me we are going to make Blender Game Engine one of the prior development plans for this year? It will just be incredibly awesome! Blender is already very well known for Animation and Modelling! Can you imagine being it for Gaming? Gaming is the most highspeed rising company around the world! Gaming makes more money than music and movies together! COME ONE!!!!! Gaming Blender!

Is there any interest in the “business” side of running a production? We do a lot of work with Apache Open for Business, which has support for tracking man hours against invoices, charging for manufacturing runs, allocating manpower and fixed inventories of resources. All sorts of business processes. If Gooseberry was a studio based production there would be budgets for all these things and they would need to be managed and rolled up for the producers. It would be interesting to map these kinds of needs into a Free Software ERP system.

Thinking this sounds really cool. In fact it sounds like something ripped out of my brain hehe. I have been thinking Blender, together with other free software, should be better at collaborating projects. I hope these project tools can be something for whole communitie(s), so everybody can collaborate on projects more easy. I imagine how fast ten thousands of artists can spawn a good movie or a good game if working together. 🙂

my children have grown up while i was otherwise
occupied : but we still have the story — told part in print; part in blender animations; part as stage play; as board game, trading cards, pokemon-type gameboy clone; doll house; sandcastles…

last weekend i returned to the old homestead — the summer vacations of my own childhood — as well as my family…

in the winter polar vortex storm the pipes had frozen solid and snapped — the water was an inch-deep in the parlour — the concluding episode of the Smoos sequence was being scripted before me — live.

so completing the telling of that story will be part of my own re-emersion
in Blender — one way or another, i will continue to make my models,
renderings, libraries etc, available to the Blender community

i compose this now as a draft document — knowing much of it will be off
topic — i try to use only my own perimeter for the personal detail —
may it suffice to say that i will behind the Gooseberry plans — even as I
plan to continue my own efforts — I already think of Smoos as any other available
berry: — raspberry because by of my own grandma’s homemade jam;
blueberry — the sweetest, most plentiful, king of berries;
partridgberries; bakeapples; magna-tea-berries (smoos’ eggs) —
gooseberries, i grant you, present subtle rendering challenges in terms of the
interplay of light/translucence and the varying layers of pulp and seeds —
i try to be a good contributor to the fruits of others and not just a
renderer into the bitbuckets of my own vision

so know that i am still amongst you — i still build my castles in the air
and my moats and dikes from the sand

yrs jef / aka “the daddy who pretended not to believe in Smoos” / aka the voice of
“Ozymandius Smoo — Counsel to the Rulers of the Seven Stars”

What is the situation with the blender game engine. I just started using Blender to work on the models of a promo game and have read that the game engine is not worth developing on because there is no support for it. I have Unity Pro but wonder can quality games be made on Blender and can they be distributed. I’ve seen many online debates about BGE and Unity but nothing conclusive. What are your thoughts Ton and will Blender be working on making the BGE something viable.

I do not see anything about Blender’s use in education. I think there is tremendous potential in knowledge immersion which I would define as the interactive book/movie (interacting with my learning/knowledge acquisition). Instead of reading a book I am experiencing the book. The blender environment would allow me (at my own pace) to search, think, and visualize in ways that are impossible in print. The teacher is inside blender.

The weakest part of the past Open Movies was usually the script, and that is the most crucial part – on the website it’s written that “Script development is currently ongoing and will continue until August.” Do you have people that do screenwriting for a living on the team?